What Does Print Drums Mean?

[selke61]

So I hear this term on here time to time, and I want to know what it means. I'll get into why after I explain what's up (LENGTHY DETAILS):

As of lately, since I started editing drums/synths on Cubase rather using standalone programs and importing them, my Cubase freezes up on me sometimes, and it get's really slow, even though my VST meter is very low and my RAM meter, (the one the right I'm assuming is RAM???) is hardly in use and only spikes when I click stuff or press the space bar to play music (always did that, dont know why).

Long story short, I use MIDI editing on Cubase with all drum pieces to their own tracks, and several Nexus' if the song has different synths.

I froze all those tracks, and it still goes slow. Now that I have the kick, snare, etc, and like 3-4 Nexus' running, Cubase goes slow/freezes; when I use to use the standalone programs I'd just import the drums as a .wav file and they were already mixed and were bounced down to one file, same for synths. Usage was very low.

So, I was wondering what I could do to lower RAM usage (printing????), cause I'm assuming it's that. On my task manager, Cubase, with everything running, is about 500,000 kbs in use. It never went that high before.

So, does printing perhaps mean taking what you've already mixed (MIDI wise) and exporting them to .wavs? Cause with all those MIDI plug-ins running, it's running a number on my RAM. So, sorry for all that explanation, but I'd figure I'd give you guys a clear idea of whats going on. The freezing and slowness is really putting a damper on my workflow.

 

[Fandus]

Yep printing is to take one track (either midi or audio) and record it onto a new audio track. The idea being instead of running multiple plugins you print it with those plugins enabled, then you have a straight up .wav file with all your effects on it and you can delete the track that was hogging ram.

However I would print each individual drum to its own track, otherwise you've locked yourself in.

 

[selke61]

Yep printing is to take one track (either midi or audio) and record it onto a new audio track. The idea being instead of running multiple plugins you print it with those plugins enabled, then you have a straight up .wav file with all your effects on it and you can delete the track that was hogging ram.

However I would print each individual drum to its own track, otherwise you've locked yourself in.

That makes a lot more sense. So would I take, for instance, the kick track and route it to a separate .wav track? How would I go about that? And when I record it, do I just sit back and let the kick get tracked? Or is there a way I can just like export it.

 

[Tommy Evans]

I would just export the individual tracks then fly those wav files back in after closing/reopening my DAW. But if your DAW has a 'print' feature in it, that's what it's meant for.

 

[jimwilbourne]

Freeze track function is very useful for this.

 

[selke61]

Yeah, I used freeze, but it still slows Cubase

 

[jimwilbourne]

Yeah, I used freeze, but it still slows Cubase

I've always been under the impression that freezing was pretty much as low usage as exporting. are the tracks your froze disabled?

 

[selke61]

Yeah, I can't even touch them. It lowers the VST usages by a lot. But it still goes pretty slow. Without all the Nexus' running (which I froze as well) it speeds up and the usage is about 200,000 kbs, so way better.

 

[Vinny]

Route the output of your original track (or bus/aux) to the input of a new track. Arm the new track and press record. Delete the original track when you are done.

BAM. You are done.

 

[selke61]

Route the output of your original track (or bus/aux) to the input of a new track. Arm the new track and press record. Delete the original track when you are done.

BAM. You are done.

Sweet deal. Figured it was that easy. Thanks

 

[Vinny]

No problem

 

[Vinny]

Or you can use "Bounce In Place" if your DAW has that function. I use that more often than the way I described above. Logic Pro 9 has it, not sure about Cubase.

 

[selke61]

I dont think it does

 

[timislegend]

ok ... let's take a step back here. if you want to reduce cpu usage, you need to adapt to a different workflow.

i don't know what kind of drum library but i can guarantee that it's either multi multi-timbral or has an internal routing configuration, same goes for nexus.

for this all you would need to do is insert the one instantiation of each plugin to an instrument track then route the midi channels to the virtual instrument. finally, when you would like to print the individual instruments, you will just need to route the plugin's multichannel outputs to new audio tracks.

all of this would be coming from only one multichannel (multi-timbral) instrument plugin-

example:

midi -to- superior drummer -outputs to- audio track(s)
midi -to- nexus -outputs to- audio track(s)


voilà!

 

[selke61]

I use multi-out function for my drums. I use one instance of the plugin and I have separate audio tracks for each drum piece.

 

[timislegend]

hmm... why would you say this?

Long story short, I use MIDI editing on Cubase with all drum pieces to their own tracks, and several Nexus' if the song has different synths.

you would only need to use one midi/instrument track to perform the drums... then you could route the multi-outputs to audio tracks of your choice.

 

[selke61]

I guess I was just getting carried away with useless details. Simply put; I use one instance of my drum plug in and I have a few Nexus' running because I can't use the same one for all the synths because they all have different styles. But the problem is solved now. The drums were never the problem, just the 3-4 Nexus'. I "print" each separate Nexus track and then remove the plug in and then Cubase runs up to speed. And I also just thought I'd learn the term "print", which I have.

 

[timislegend]

well done

 

[selke61]

Thanks